In this week’s How the F*ck SEO case study, I caught up with Gordana Sretenovic to talk content operations.
Gordana and her team created 800 pages a month at one point last year and they even created a SaaS platform, Workello, to solve their own content-scaling needs.
When you’re operating at that level, operating procedures are crucial. Your team needs to be coordinated and dependencies ironed out.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
⚡ What is content operations and why are they important?
⚡ Why would you want to scale content to 100s per month?
Part One: The Content Operations Software Stack
⚡ The 8 tools you need in your operation
Part Two: The Writer Hiring Operation
⚡ Where to find writers at scale
⚡ How to qualify great writers
⚡ Write ethics
Part Three: All the Documentation You Must Have
⚡ Documentation you must have to succeed
⚡ How to create great templates
Let’s dive into the playbook.
What are content operations?
Content operations are the processes you build to enable the efficient production of quality content.
One person, with all the right inputs, can create a great piece of content. But, can you do it 800 times a month without quality slipping?
With the right procedures in place, the answer is "yes, most of the time".
Your content operations often take the form of guidelines for your team. When it comes to creating large volumes of content in a short amount of time, there are far too many moving parts to not invest in things like clear documentation and enablement technology.
Gordana Sretenovic and her team had 15 editors and 30 writers in it at one point. Each worked with a variety of clients and in total, they produced up to 800 blog posts in one month.
Think of all the questions that might come up in that journey for each writer:
- Who should I contact for support about X topic?
- What should I write about?
- How do I search-optimize each article?
- Which internal links should I prioritize?
- Where do I get images for this?
And for your team:
- How can I make sure to hire great writers?
- How do I onboard my new team member?
- How can I optimize my workflows?
Answering these questions in a way that creates efficiency?
That’s content operations.
Great content operations generally span three areas. People, process, and technology.
You need all of them working together to keep the ship moving in the right direction.
Why are content operations important?
As I briefly touched on, the most important reason for content operations is quality.
When you’re producing 800 blog posts a month, you need strict processes to make sure 100 of them aren’t low quality.
It’s easy to think if you publish a lot then it must be bad content. And that there’s not enough time to do proper quality assurance.
But as Gordana mentioned, the #1 thing you need to think about when scaling up content production is, “How can we scale this but keep the quality levels the same?”
“We’re huge nerds, we all studied literature and language, and for us it’s not, you know, it doesn’t matter how much we publish if it’s not good content. That’s our primary concern.”—Gordana Sretenovic, Workello
And, with good operations, she says anyone can do it. Just don’t expect it to go perfectly the first time.
“When we started scaling the whole process, publishing more content, hiring more people to do it, it just became so hard for me. Because I was the one leading the content quality initiative there. It just became incredibly hard and I definitely let some things slip in the beginning before I realized, okay, this is not working.”
“You can't do this on your own. You have to document literally all the guidelines, everything that you want, your writers, your editors. There's just no way for one person to create that much content on their own. So yeah, definitely we had some struggles there and it was not easy building that knowledge base.”—Gordana Sretenovic, Workello
In short, content operations are critical to driving quality in a scaled-up environment.
Why Should You Scale Content Production to This Extent?
Not everyone should scale their content to 100 blog posts a month in month one.
Starting off with 10-20 blogs/month is important because it allows you to iron out the kinks in your processes. Teach your team how to produce really great content, document exactly how, and then ramp the operation up.
Typically, people who want to scale up their content have one goal: to dominate their niche.
“Whatever industry they’re in, they wanna be #1”—Gordana Sretenovic, Workello
How does rapidly producing content help achieve that goal?
In short, more content = more traffic.
There are so many nuances to Google’s Search Algorithm. No one has completely cracked the code, I can’t think of a single website that ranks #1 for all the terms they try to.
For that reason, to scale search traffic in your niche, it’s important that you:
- Produce high volumes of content
- Build topical authority (more content on the same topic = good for all your content)
- Continuously update and refresh what isn’t working
Let’s hear Gordana’s answer on this:
“Some people say you don't need hundreds of pages. Some people say you need hundreds of pages. I think you actually do.
And I mean it's very simple. If I were researching something, whatever it is, let's say in the pet space, my dog is not feeling well and I want to know how to fix their problems. I will definitely trust someone like veterinarians.org. They have so many pages of content. Obviously, you know, they work with dogs. They're a credible brand rather than, you know, sallysblog.com that talks about knitting and then has one article on why my dog is feeling bad.”—Gordana Sretenovic, Workello
"It works like this in academia as well. When you research your credible sources, you obviously want someone who is an established brand. They obviously know what they're talking about. They have a lot of content. So it really makes sense. And when you look at any niche, you will see that all the top players have a lot of content. I'm sure there are exceptions”
Let’s take a look at exactly how to set up your content operations.
Three Core Parts of Your Content Operations
Great content operations have three foundational components:
- Your software stack
- Your knowledge transfer documentation
- Your hiring processes
We're going to deep dive into all three. It's a big one, so buckle up.
